“300: Rise of an Empire” is a bit of a downer

A character in “300: Rise of an Empire” calls forth “a wind of freedom, a wind of justice, a wind of vengeance.”

Reader: The movie has a lot of wind.

Endless swaths of boring narration blow hot air over the movie, competing for screen time with stylized battle scenes that feature horses jumping through fire, limbs being lopped off, children being gang-raped and, most poignantly, a father-and-son disemboweling.

The characters are so indistinguishable and the time frame so puzzling — “Empire” takes place before, during and after the original “300,” and it's always willing to interrupt whatever time frame it's in to flash back to a decapitation from a previous era — that all audiences can do is try to keep track of which side is slicing a limb off which side.

The good guys are the Greeks, led by Themistokles, played by Sullivan Stapleton. He's an Australian actor who is just as handsome as Gerard Butler was in “300” but nowhere near as charismatic.

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As a result, you may find yourself more drawn to the bad guys, the Persians, who are led by a naval commander named Artemisia, who, with her appetite for rough sex and fetish for french-kissing severed heads, seems more like she's from Pervsia than Persia.

Eva Green, who was 007's possible fiancee in “Casino Royale,” plays Artemisia as if she noticed how sluggish the script is and decided her best strategy was to ooze evil out of every pore. It was a good call.

“300” was no masterpiece, but it had a concise story and incredibly inventive visuals, inspired by the illustrations in Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name. The diffuse sequel has neither of those things, and it's also missing the most interesting characters.